Random update with some Sweeney Todd gushing

Believe it or not, I am still off-line (which is why I'm not writing on this blog at all) - all thanks to Tele2. The way things are going we're probably going to go back to T.P. S.A.
First they said that it would take 2 weeks at most to connect us up and probably less. Then they said they didn't say that, that it always takes 30 days. As the 30 days came to an end they phoned to say that it would take another 30 days. Under pressure from my mum who was being very aggressive with whoever it was that phoned, they admitted that they had fucked up. The courier who came to our house (4 days later than arranged) with the contract apparently got something wrong and because of that we have to sign a different agreement (one that involves paying 80zl for a modem we're not actually going to get) and wait another 30 days. Nice, huh?

Other than that, I saw Sweeney Todd yesterday and was not disappointed *grin* Of course as usual me and Kinga embarassed ourselves by being the only people in the cinema laughing (only that this time we were joined by Andreja, who was laughing even louder than us).
I don't think the film is as gory as the reviews I read made it out to be. A lot of the Hollywood reviewers wrote that the film would have been treated much better by the award ceremonies if it had less gore, but I really don't get what they wanted cut. Yes, the film is somewhat bloody, but to avoid that you have only two options really:
1) Make the throat cutting scenes more realistic with less blood flying all over the place.
2) Alter the plot of the film to include less throat cutting.
IMO neither of these would have been a good idea for the film.
If you did option one then (as Tim Burton himself put it) you're going to make the film a lot more heavy. You lose the humour and actually make the film a whole lot more shocking. On the other hand maybe the reviewers just didn't get the humour - clearly most of the people in the cinema didn't yesterday ;-P I on the other hand thought some of it was hilarious. How can you not laugh at a man singing an emotional song about how beautiful and lovely his daughter is whilst he's busy cutting the throats of his clients?
Option two would interfere with Sweeney's character - there's a point in the plot where he's supposed go crazy with his need for blood. Include less throat cutting and you don't get that through (which would ruin the culmination point of the film).

Anyway, I still stand by recommending this film ;-P Even if you're not that into gore, as long as you don't mind it I think it's fun to see for the acting alone. The whole cast is great - and I don't just mean the star names, but some of the younger, lesser known members of the cast were awesome too. The great thing about the film is that every character, however small the part, is memorable. My one disapointment is Timothy Spall who IMO is a way better actor than what he showed in this film. I don't think the Beadle should have been played as a villain, not really. This just isn't the sort of film where you need to have "I'm a bad person" spelled out about any of the characters - their actions kind of give it away very early in the film ;-P

2007 MEETS 2008 | PART 2: 2008 in Polish cinemas

This is a list of films that I'm excited about, ordered by the Polish release date (the dates may of course still change). You can treat it as an open invitation to see any of these films in the cinema with me ;)

18th January, 2008 Lust, Caution



Why I'm excited?
It's Ang Lee's first film after Brokeback Mountain, so I guess I would have always been curious about it (like a lot of the cinema going world I think). But the controversy surrounding it has made it even more of a must see for me. It received an NC-17 certificate in the US which is very rare - especially for such a mainstream director. And Ang Lee isn't known for sexually explicit films.
The Chinese angle is also very interesting for me - it's a China-USA co-production and I guess somehow just the idea that a Chinese production company would be doing a film that is that explicit has an interest factor in it for me (even if the film was cut significantly for Chinese audiences).
Surprisingly enough there is also a Bollywood angle to the film since Anupam Kher has a small part in it (his face will probably be familiar to you if you've watched a few Indian films).
Finally, this is the film that won the main prize at the Venice film festival in September and of all the big film festivals and award ceremonies Venice is probably the one I trust the most.

Previous mentions on my blog

• The MPAA and the BBFC - how the US and UK deal with sex and violence in films

15th February, 2008 The Kite Runner



Why I'm excited?
Well, I'm not expecting it to be the best of films (even though AFAIK the reviews in the US have been good), but somehow I'm just getting a kick out of Hollywood making a film that is so heavily based in Afghanistan, but at the same time doesn't seem to be particularly political (I may be wrong about this, but that's my impression thus far).
The story itself sounds rather interesting (I'm just hoping it won't be told as sentimentally as it's treated on the trailer). It's about two boys who are good friends. The turning point is when one of the boys gets abused and raped and the other just lets it happen. And then the rest of the film is largely about the guilt of allowing that. Apparently, a lot of people wanted the director to take out the rape scene (leaving in just the violence). But he said it was necessary because you had to feel how terrible the deed was for the attempts at redemption to follow naturally. I guess that comment got me even more curious.

Previous mentions on my blog
None

22nd February, 2008 Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street



Why I'm excited?
Do I even have to explain this one? lol

Previous mentions on my blog

• Initial promotion for Tim Burton's "Sweeney Todd"
• Sweeney Todd trailer - yay!
• Can Johnny Depp sing?
• Second Sweeney Todd trailer
• Sweeney Todd promotion in full throb

? March, 2008 Dhoom 2



Why I'm excited?
Bollywood + Hrithik Roshan + Abhishek Bachchan + a trailer like that = fun ;)

Previous mentions on my blog

• Dhoom 2

13th June, 2008 The Happening

No trailer available yet.

Why I'm excited?
For a reaaaaally dumb reason - it's the first time that an Indian producer (UTV) is co-producing what is essentially a Hollywood film.
That said, it's directed by M. Night Shyamalan, so there's hope that in ecological thriller terms it won't be so bad ;)

Previous mentions on my blog

• Bollywood and Hollywood together - it's happening!

? September or October, 2008 Jhoom Barabar Jhoom



Why I'm excited?
Because more Bollywood in Polish cinemas is always a good thing and when it involves Abhishek Bachchan then it's even better ;)

Previous mentions on my blog
None


28th November, 2008 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

No trailer available yet.

Why I'm excited?
Because I'm amongst the Harry Potter fans who think the films are getting better and better ;) Plus there's a few scenes in this one that I soooo want to see on screen *dreamy eyes*

Previous mentions on my blog
None

Some time during 2008? I'm not there
So far there's no release date for Poland, but the film sounds big enough to have gotten a distributor, so I expect we will be seeing it at some point during 2008 (the world premiere was in September 2007).



Why I'm excited?
Because Cate Blanchett, Ben Whishaw, Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and a little boy I don't know called Marcus Carl Franklin are all playing the same person and according to the buzz the film actually works lol All of these are terrific actors, so it should be quite something.

Previous mentions on my blog
None

late in 2008? Om Shanti Om
2008 is probably wishful thinking on my part as no Polish distributor has bought the rights as of yet, but hey - a year after its initial release is not exactly soon ;-P I'm pretty sure *somebody* will pick up the rights as Om Shanti Om is on its way to become the highest grosser in Indian cinema history.



Why I'm excited?
Shahrukh Khan is quite enough for me to be excited about any film ;)

Previous mentions on my blog

• "Om Shanti Om" - Shahrukh's next release
• Tom Cruise film loses out to two Bollywood films i...
• Another Shahrukh interview (OSO promotion)

Late in 2008? Brüno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt

No trailer available yet.

Why I'm excited?
This is Sacha Baron Cohen's next and I like him, so I guess a project with a title like that has to get some curiosity from me ;)

Previous mentions on my blog
None

Sweeney Todd promotion in full throb

Sweeney Todd is receiving a great deal of attention at the moment. There's been a multitude of TV spots and various promotional clips released and the first press screenings have produced some glowing reviews. This post is a selection of what I thought was most interesting :)

A while back now, we got our first proper look at Johnny Depp singing and it was a really effective first look *grin*
Warner Bros followed this up by releasing 9 scenes from the film as well as 3 featurettes and 2 clips with behind the scenes footage. They were first posted on iesb where for a while they were exclusive, but eventually they made their way to other sites (like yahoo) and of course they're all over youtube now (I recommend this playlist for a very full set of Sweeney Todd clips). While all of them are great, here's some of my personal favourites...

This is scene no.4 "The Contest" and it's the first proper look we've had of Sascha Baron Cohen in the film. He plays a rival barber from Italy - Adolfo Pirelli. The clip is a public contest between him and Sweeney (Sweeney cheats apparently):


We also get our first look at Alan Rickman (scene no.3 "You Gandered at my Ward"). The boy on the clip is Jamie Campbell Bower who is said to have gotten the part of young Voldemort in the 6th Harry Potter film.


Here's scene no.6 - "Epiphany", it's terrificly dramatic :)


My favourite featurette is the one about the cast:

One thing that surprised me on this clip (as well as the "You Gandered at my Ward" one) is how much I'm enjoying the bits with Johanna and Anthony. I thought that would be the least interesting bit of the film for me because it sounded like a cliche romance in the plot description, but I love what they've done with it. Somehow putting such pure innocence amongst all these totally perverse characters makes everything even more funny ;) And the actors for Anthony and Johanna are cast so well! Even the voices - they have rather high voices which makes them sound all the more innocent. I love the "So we run away and then all our dreams come true" line lol And it's so well delivered!
I guess the one (and so far only) disappointment for me is Timothy Spall. Anyone who's seen "Secrets & Lies" knows what a terrific actor he is, but so far I don't like what I've seen of his work in Sweeney Todd or even the way he spoke of the character. Johnny Depp has said in interviews that he thinks of Sweeney as a very sensitive character (despite his murderous qualities), Helena Bonham-Carter while she's gone out and said that her character is totally immoral has also said that the main thing that defines her is that she's tragically in love with someone who doesn't love her back and finally Alan Rickman underlines that his character has no idea that he has an appalling set of morals. You can see all three of them concentrating not so much on the perverse appearance that these characters give off, but on what the characters feel. Not so with Timothy Spall, however, and IMO you can see it in those clips. He's clearly concentrating on giving the appearance of being bad - the sly smiles, the intonation that gives away that really what he's saying is false and so on. Honestly, with a script like this, the appearance of "being bad" will come on its own. Even if you pretended what the character is doing is the most moral thing in the world you could not avoid the perverse appearance of the character (in fact, if you did that you would probably give off an even stronger air of perverseness ;-P). So yeah... from what I've seen so far I'm disappointed with Timothy Spall, but hey the film is clearly going to be brilliant anyway :-D And there's always the chance that I've judged him too quickly.

Finally, apart from film clips, you can also listen to a bit more of the music here. I love the lyrics lol

There's been loads of interviews as well.
The Sweeney section in this article is very short, but it has one quote which is to die for:
Depp was nervous about singing because, Burton explains: "It's like casting a porno movie, having people sing. They feel they're being asked to take their clothes off."
This is a video interview with Johnny Depp and Tim Burton which I really recommend (it has Johnny giggling so hard that he almost spits coffee all over himself).
And you can download this Musical Talk podcast episode which has some great interviews with loads of people behind Sweeney Todd.
These are transcripts from the London press junket. They're a lot of fun :)

Film critics are getting excited about the film as well. Tom O'Neil has long predicted the film would be a serious contender for the Academy Awards. Most film critics thought his predictions rather laughable, but the press screenings seem to have changed some minds. The question is will the blood flow (apparently the film is veeeery gory) effect its chances.

Oh, and finally the good news is we have a release date for Poland :) It's the 22nd of February (my visions were much more nightmareish - I was thinking May or something like that).

Second Sweeney Todd trailer

This is the second trailer and apparently there's still more to come (they're all supposed to emphasize different aspects of the film). This one emphasizes the gore and thriller aspects of the film.
There's a few new shots and lines in there:

I so wish we at least had a Polish date for the release :-/ Still no date is set and judging by the dates on which the film will be released in other countries, I'm expecting the film in Poland in spring 2008 at the earliest :-/

Sweeney Todd trailer - yay!

Finally, the trailer for Sweeney Todd is out!! And it looks as good as I hoped it would :D Check it out:

Initial promotion for Tim Burton's "Sweeney Todd"

It's still going to be a long wait before Sweeney Todd comes out (no release date set for Poland yet, but I think we'll be lucky if it comes out any earlier than February 2008). But even though we don't have a trailer yet, the temptation to write about it is too big - I've been extremely excited for this film ever since I first heard about it!
I mean you've got a very gory Broadway musical translated to film with Tim Burton as director - that's got to be interesting in itself, right? But once the plot and cast is put in place it gets better!
It's about Benjamin Barker (Johnny Depp) who is a barber in 19th century London. He has a wife and a very young daughter, Johanna. And then one day, with the purpose of er... taking the barber's wife for himself, judge Turpin (Alan Rickman) imprisons Benjamin Barker on false accusations. Many years later (by which time the judge is lusting after Johanna, who is now 16), Benjamin Barker comes back as Sweeney Todd and decides to revenge himself on the world for the injustice that has happened to him and proceeds in cutting the throats of all who come his way. He has help in Mrs Lovett (Helena Bonham-Carter) who uses the corpses to make meat pies.
We're also going to get Timothy Spall (he'll be playing some sort of accomplice to judge Turpin) and Sacha Baron Cohen (who will be playing a rival barber).
All of them are going to be doing their own singing which is particularly interesting in that this is supposed to be one of the most difficult Broadway musicals to sing. Some go as far as to call it an operetta rather than a musical.

The poster is out, but more interestingly just recently the first clip of the film was shown to an audience. This was at the Venice festival. Unfortunately, it hasn't surfaced on-line, but hopefully this means we won't have to wait for a trailer too long. The clip (in which Johnny Depp is psychotically singing to a razor) has gotten rave reviews, here's one of them.
And here's Stephen Sondheim (the author of the musical) teaching Guildhall School students the song in question:

It's going to be really fab, isn't it? :-D

The Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: The Prince of Thieves (1991)

I just watched "Robin Hood: The Prince of Thieves" and had a really good laugh. It is a very Hollywoodish film (as in Robin Hood is your classic unflawed action hero), but I was surprised at some of the themes in it to the point of wondering how it's possible that censors and Hollywood producers (in the early 1990s no less) let that through. And then I visited IMDb's trivia page for this film and found out that actually they didn't let these things through ;-P
Don't get me wrong, it's not as if there's anything that shocking in it, but it's not what you'd expect of a light-hearted movie like this - particularly one which is aiming at rather low age certificates (PG in the UK, PG-13 in the US).

From what I can make out (based on the IMDb boards for this film), I was watching the extended British DVD version which has less cuts than the original theatrical release, but is still cut more than some of the DVD releases elsewhere in the world. The reason for this is that the British distributor wanted to retain a PG certificate for the film.

What does the Sheriff of Nottingham have to do with all these censorship musings? Well, that was the character that they cut the most of (this film is quite a different take on him). The cuts not relating to him were done purely because of excessive gore, although why they were excessive I cannot say because the version I saw didn't have them in ;-P (Although to give you an inkling - even in what I saw, this film is pretty heavy on medieval torture)
Most of the scenes relating to the Sheriff were thankfully (because I thought they were the best part of the film) left in my version, although I'm rather disapointed at not having seen him scheduling his whores with words such as "you! my room...10:30. and you! 10:45. and bring a friend." .
One of the most baffling cuts that were made to the version of the film that I watched is the removal of part of the famous spoon dialogue (it's so famous that WikiQuote has it on its spoon page). They kept the first line, but removed the other two. I don't quite understand this cut (why would those lines make a difference between a PG or higher certificate?), but see what you think for yourself - here is the quote:
"Locksley! I'm gonna cut your heart out with a spoon."
"Why a spoon cousin? Why not an axe?"
"Because it's dull, you twit, it'll hurt more."

I cannot continue writing without mentioning how good Alan Rickman is as the Sheriff and prewarn you that there might be quite a lot of gushing about him in the rest of this post ;-P I would have put in a video link here, but I haven't found anything suitable (the trailer is awful and has hardly any of Rickman in it anyway), so I'll content myself with a link to a picture of him as the Sheriff of Nottingham.
So first of all, one of the reasons to love the Sheriff of Nottingham in this film is that he has all the best lines ;-P There's some very black humour there (something that I think doesn't usually feature in American action films) and the way Alan Rickman delivers it is absolutely hilarious.
While the darkness of the character is maybe not portrayed that graphically, it is certainly one of the most perverse Hollywood villains I've seen in a while. Right at the start we're introduced not just to the atrocities he inflicts on people and his lack of anykind of fair play (quite classic elements to any Hollywood villain ;-P), but also to his total lack of sexual inhibition and perhaps most perversely (at least I was very surprised to see this and it didn't make the theatrical release) the film also shows him worshipping the devil.
But apparently, Alan Rickman wasn't playing a villain *grin* Here is something he says in the DVD extras:
I'm not playing a villain. I'm just playing somebody who has a certain checklist of things that he wants in life and he goes after them. And other people say, like Robin Hood decides, that's appalling and it must be stopped.
While the quote totally cracks me up, this is actually what I most loved about Alan Rickman's portrayal. Despite playing some things which are quite perverse when you start thinking about them, the way it's done there's just no judgement of whether the Sheriff is doing right or wrong, it's played as if whatever Nottingham is doing is the most natural thing in the world to do. This, as you might imagine, has a rather bizzarre effect in scenes such as a bishop performing a marriage ceremony while the Sheriff is holding his bride down on the floor and preparing to rape her in front of the bishop the moment the marriage is proclaimed (this was probably my favourite scene, although hardly the only one I loved).

On a final note, here's a thread on the IMDb boards that amused me a lot. I'm very obviously not alone in adoring Alan Rickman as Nottingham (the thread is titled "Did anyone else want the Sheriff of Nottingham to win?"). I doubt anyone will want to wade through the whole thing because it's very long. It's basically lots of people gushing about Alan Rickman and many of them saying he was much better than Kevin Costner (who played Robin Hood) and then there's people who think these people who like Nottingham so much are mad and saying Costner was way better and how can anybody find such an evil character sexy anyway. There are two quotes that particularly cracked me up. The first is by somebody who like me clearly enjoyed Nottingham a lot, but I find her wording rather amusing:
Its very impolite to want to cut someones heart out with a spoon but he makes it sound so funny!
And then there's a post by somebody who thinks all these people gushing over such an evil character are completely mad:
Lets's see...you guys are all rooting for a man who is a: murderer (of his own cousin and no doubt thousands of others); a would-be rapist; a devil worshipper; a contract killer (hiring Celts to do his dirty work); a pervert (with dozens of whores at his beck and call). Yeah, you picked a real upstanding criminal to admire and drool over. WELL NOT ME!